Free Save Me the Waltz: A Novel by Zelda Fitzgerald

progressive celebration that a few years later followed the boom about New York like the Salvation Army follows Christmas, to absolve themselves in the waters of each other’s unrest.
    “Mister,” Tanka greeted them from the steps, “and Missy.”
    Tanka was the Japanese butler. They couldn’t have afforded him without borrowing from David’s dealer. He cost money; that wasbecause he constructed botanical gardens out of cucumbers and floral displays with the butter and made up the money for his flute lessons from the grocery bills. They had tried to do without him till Alabama cut her hand on a can of baked beans and David sprained his painting wrist on the lawn mower.
    The Oriental swept the floor in an inclusive rotation of his body, indicating himself as the axis of the earth. Bursting suddenly into a roar of disquieting laughter, he turned to Alabama.
    “Missy, kin see you jessy minute—jessy minute, this way, please.”
    “He’s going to ask for change,” thought Alabama, uneasily following him to the side porch.
    “Look!” said Tanka. With a gesture of negation, he indicated the hammock swung between the columns of the house where two young men lay uproariously asleep with a bottle of gin by their sides.
    “Well,” she said hesitantly, “you’d better tell Mister—but not in front of the family, Tanka.”
    “Velly careful,” nodded the Jap, making a shushing sound and barring his lips with his fingers.
    “Listen, Mamma, I think you’d better come upstairs and rest before dinner,” suggested Alabama. “You must be tired after your trip.”
    From the sense that she had nothing whatever to do with herself which radiated from the girl as she descended from her parents’ room, David knew that something was wrong.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Matter! There are drunks in the hammock. If Daddy sees that there’ll be hell to pay!”
    “Send them away.”
    “They can’t move.”
    “My God! Tanka’ll just have to see that they stay outside until after dinner.”
    “Do you think the Judge would understand?”
    “I’m afraid so——”
    Alabama stared about disconsolately.
    “Well—I suppose there comes a moment when people must choose between their contemporaries and their families.”
    “Are they in very bad shape?”
    “Pretty hopeless. If we send for the ambulance, it would just make a scene,” she said tentatively.
    The moiré sheen of the afternoon polished the sterility of the rooms’ colonial picturesqueness and scratched itself on the yellow flowers thattrailed the mantel like featherstitching. It was a priestly light curving in the dips and hollows of a melancholic waltz.
    “I don’t see what we can do about it,” they agreed.
    Alabama and David stood there anxiously in the quiet till the clang of a spoon on a tin waiter summoned them to dinner.
    “I’m glad to see,” said Austin over the beets like roses, “that you have succeeded in taming Alabama a little. She seems to have become a very good housekeeper since her marriage.” The Judge was impressed with the beets.
    David thought of his buttons upstairs. They were all off.
    “Yes,” he said vaguely.
    “David has been working very well out here,” Alabama broke in nervously.
    She was about to paint a picture of their domestic perfections when a loud groan from the hammock warned her. Staggering through the dining room door with a visionary air, the young man eyed the gathering. On the whole he was all there; just a little awry—his shirttail was out.
    “Good evening,” he said formally.
    “I think your friend had better have some dinner,” suggested the baffled Austin.
    The friend exploded in foolish laughter.
    Miss Millie confusedly inspected Tanka’s flowery architecture. Of course, she wanted Alabama to have friends. She had always brought up her children with that in mind, but circumstances were, at times, dubious.
    A second disheveled phantom groped through the door; the silence was broken only by squeaky